| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: down a geyser's mouth, that geyser will presently be forced to
lay all before you, and for days afterward will be of an
irritated and inconstant stomach.
When they told me the tale I was filled with sympathy. Now I
wish that I had soft-soap and tried the experiment on some lonely
little beast far away in the woods. It sounds so probable and so
human.
Yet he would be a bold man who would administer emetics to the
Giantess. She is flat-lipped, having no mouth; she looks like a
pool, fifty feet long and thirty wide, and there is no
ornamentation about her. At irregular intervals she speaks and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious
and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already
quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from
night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in
his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many
superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that
life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure
so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that
demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a
creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any
beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: fears to approach his mistress, however complying she may be, he ended
by crossing the threshold and asking if Maitre Francois Porbus were
within. At the affirmative answer of an old woman who was sweeping out
one of the lower rooms the young man slowly mounted the stairway,
stopping from time to time and hesitating, like a newly fledged
courier doubtful as to what sort of reception the king might grant
him.
When he reached the upper landing of the spiral ascent, he paused a
moment before laying hold of a grotesque knocker which ornamented the
door of the atelier where the famous painter of Henry IV.--neglected
by Marie de Medicis for Rubens--was probably at work. The young man
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